Thank you to Netgalley and Rebellion for the E-Arc in return for an honest review.

Signal to Noise follows Meche and her two friends as they discover magic and begin to harness it to bend the rules to their own will. The story alternates from 1988 when they were teens using magic, to 2009, twenty years after an abrupt end to their friendship, when Meche returns home to Mexico City for her fathers funeral.  

I’ve read some of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s other works and really enjoyed them, and while I thought this was good, I was a bit disappointed by it. I could definitely feel in the story and writing that this was her first novel. The writing was not bad by any means but coming from her later works, I could see how much she had developed since writing this. The future pov didn’t add much to the story in my opinion, and honestly I think could’ve been cut out completely, as well as the romance between certain characters. The two characters lacked the chemistry that I think they were supposed to have. In the end when they revealed that they had been in love with each other the entire time, I did not buy it at all. While I was reading this I found that not much happened for a majority of the book, it is almost 400 pages yet it doesn’t get very interesting until the last hundred pages. When it does finally get a bit interesting at the climax of the story, it ends. It ends fairly abruptly, leaving it feel almost unfinished. The climax felt like it should’ve just been the beginning of the action but was actually the end, which was quite disappointing.

Still, there is a lot about the book that I can appreciate. Silvia Moreno-Garcia is excellent at capturing an atmosphere, and the 80s Mexico City setting was very cool. The scenes that followed the characters wandering the city were great and I really wish there were more of them. The characters, particularly Meche, had so much personality and the parts where they were all hanging out and just being teenagers were very enjoyable. They made dumb choices with dumb motivations, and were occasionally mean to each other, but it felt mostly like real dumb teenagers. Lastly, the magic and how it was harnessed was unique and fit the setting of the story very well and I thought it was well done.

Overall, I didn’t love this book and wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to everyone, but I think it is still worth checking out for fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I also think the story of teenagers using magic in the late 80s could be appealing to fans of Stranger Things or The Craft, so if that’s you, maybe give it a try.